307. CARTHAGE, literally “new city,” second home of Queen Dido and the site of her tragic affair with Aeneus (see Virgil*, Aeneid (see note 92), was for St. Augustine a new world. See Augustine, Confessions (398 AD) 3.1.1, as cited by Eliot (translation not identified).
Eliot*: “V. St. Augustine’s Confessions: ‘to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.’”
See also Confessions 10.16.25 (tr. E. B. Pusey, 1838):
“For thus do I remember Carthage, thus all places where I have been, thus men's faces whom I have seen, and things reported by the other senses; thus the health or sickness of the body.”
Augustine, born in Thagaste, North Africa, in what is now Algeria, first moved to Carthage, now in neighboring Tunisia, for schooling at the age of 16. From the start he struggled between his faith and the hedonistic lifestyle of the “subverters” he saw all around him. See Confessions 3.3.6. See also Confessions 8.7.17:
“But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, ‘Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.’ For I feared lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon cure me of the disease of concupiscence, which I wished to have satisfied, rather
than extinguished.”
At the age of 19, Augustine returned to Thagaste to teach, and while there he became greatly disturbed at the death of a close friend (compare Eliot’s loss of his friend Jean Verdenal, note 42), causing him to return to Carthage two years later.
Augustine converted to Christianity relatively late in life, at the age of 34, after being especially moved by a random passage from Romans* 13:13-14 (see Confessions 8.12.29):
“Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wanton-ness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.”
See also Confessions 10.6.8-9, and compare this to Eliot’s tour of the classical elements (notes 0.5, 26):
“This is it which I love when I love my God. And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered me, ‘I am not He’; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, ‘We are not thy God, seek above us.’ I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, ‘Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God.’ I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, ‘Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest.’ And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: ‘Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him.’ And they cried out with a loud voice, ‘He made us.’”
Finally, see Confessions 10.27.38:
“Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever
new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace.”
Augustine is referenced here and at notes 308, 309, 310, 318, 365 and 367; see also notes 26, 45, 172.5 and 182.
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* see note 0.1
